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Fig. 7B. Constan no Brumidi, ceiling of the President's Room, 1860, S-216, U.S. Capitol. ARCHITECT OF THE CAPITOL Figs. 7A-7B. Brumidi inten onally adopted the mul -sec on design of Raphael's ceiling in the Va can for the President's Room in the Capitol. 7 THE CAPITOL DOME SPRING 2014 mediums are indiscernible. Brumidi had learned in Rome how to be part of a team of painters and craftsmen working to decorate large expanses of wall with a carefully designed decorative scheme. He would call himself the "director of the works," a role greatly needed at the Capitol when he was oversee- ing several teams of artists with different skills and from different countries of origin. Perhaps he first honed his management skills when, upon the death of his father, and while still developing his skills as an artist, he took over the family coffee shop and was listed in documents as a "pittore e caffetiere" (i.e., painter and coffee-shop owner). 14 Brumidi said he had been a student for fourteen years. 15 His first known opportunity to apply what he had learned at the academy to a real project on the walls of a nearby palace came in 1836, when he was 31 years old. This was the beginning of his work for the wealthy Torlonia family. Prince Alessandro Torlonia had inherited his wealth and royal title from his successful banker father, who had acquired the title of Duke and purchased a seven- teenth-century palace on the Piazza Venezia that he filled with painting and sculpture. His son had teams of artists decorate the Palazzo Torlonia with elaborate murals. e Torlonia palace was torn down for the construc- tion of the monument to Victor Emmanuel in 1900-1901, but fortunately the murals and rooms were photographed first, and the subjects of the murals were recorded by Giuseppe Checchetelli, who credited Brumidi for painting the Torlonia coat of arms in the rone Room and a frieze depicting the Glory of Constantine. 16 e female figure of Prudence captured in a photograph (fig. 8A) is very much like the ones Brumidi would later paint in the President's Room in the Capitol (fig. 8B). In the same photograph, the illusionistic frieze, probably the one by Brumidi, painted to look like a carved stone relief, prefigures Brumidi's frieze at the base of the Capitol dome. In the Torlonia palace he also painted the times of day and decorated a gallery leading from the apartment of the prince with hunters and bacchantes, in the Pompeian style (fig. 9A); that project would prepare him to design murals for the prince's new theater and later for the Senate Naval Affairs Committee in a room (S-127, now the Senate Appropriations Room) in the Capitol, also decorated in the Pompeian style with floating bacchantes or maenads (fig. 9B). Brumidi's frescoes in the palace's neo-gothic chapel won praise: "e colors and harmony of the entire decoration are such that Brumidi's name will be accepted from now on among the greatest artists of all time." 17 In September 1842 Brumidi entered into an agreement Fig. 7A. Raphael, ceiling of the Stanza della Segnatura, 1508–1511, Va can Museums, Rome. PHOTOGRAPH BY AUTHOR